Public Relations

The book I read to research this post was Public Relations For Dummies by Eric Yaverbaum which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Katherine Hepburn once said she doesn't mind what the newspapers say about her as long as it's true. A lot of Public Relations is about being true and sincere. A big corporation might have billions of dollars to spend on Public Relations including tv campaigns and advertising in the tabloid newspapers. A small company can compete with a big company without spending anything like their amount on advertising. They can use social media where a lot of customers can be obtained for little outlay. If you run a small company you might want to handle Public Relations yourself rather than bring in a PR Agency. If you are tempted to bring in a PR Agency consider how important your companies account is to them. If they are a corporate PR Agency and you account for 0.01% of their business they are unlikely to pay much attention to promoting your company. Also ask to see previous work by the agency and compare what they told other companies they could achieve with what was actually achieved. You may find that rather than paying for advertising you can get stories out like a product launch which will still get coverage in media like magazines and newspapers and for free. Whatever you do if their is a crisis, don't bury your head in the sand, answer it and do it politely. Obviously if someone is really irate about your product offer to discuss it away from prying eyes, either by phone or email etc. This book also looks at promoting your product using podcasts and blogging etc. Another thing you ought to look into is social bookmarking with sites Technorati which can send you a lot of traffic. I did really enjoy this book which is also on quite an interesting subject.